The making of a SEAL

The New Neo Posted on by

SEAL reservist Eric Greitens on SEAL training:

What kind of man makes it through Hell Week?…

Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training””men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups””made it. Some men who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it. Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too.

Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the “fist” of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.

Physical and mental endurance are hardly mutually exclusive. As Greitens makes clear, prospective SEALS must have both in extremely generous proportions. The physical is a given, and without it the mental would not even matter. But in the end, the mental seems to be the deciding factor that gives the winners the edge.

Just as it seems to be in so many other aspects of life.

What’s up with car colors?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever happened to car colors?

It seems these days that gray’s the thing, in every possible shade and tone: silver, metallic, charcoal, light, dark, middling, and every type of gray in between. Much more gray than I care to look at.

I ask you: whose decree is this, and why?

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some spambot wit:

This site is so cool even ice cubes would be jealous.

Don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think the bot actually means “envious.” Those two words are all-too-often mixed up, a pet peeve of mine.

The distinction is explained here:

Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person’s real locus of concern is the beloved””the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing””not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person’s affections); and the envious person’s locus of concern is the rival. Hence, even if the good that the rival has is the affection of another person, there is a difference between envy and jealousy. Roughly, for the jealous person the rival is fungible and the beloved is not fungible. So he would be equally bothered if the beloved were consorting with someone else, and would not be bothered if the rival were. Whereas in envy it is the other way around. Because envy is centrally focused on competition with the rival, the subject might well be equally bothered if the rival were consorting with a different (appealing) person, but would not be bothered if the ”˜good’ had gone to someone else (with whom the subject was not in competition).

Getting Osama: how much do we need to know?

The New Neo Posted on by

The killing of Osama may have been almost perfectly executed, but the aftermath has certainly been a mess.

One of the many puzzling aspects of the whole thing has been the multiple sources of highly conflicting information. Was Osama defending himself? Was there a firefight? How did his wife get wounded? Why is there a 25-minute gap in the tape? And, of course, from those now known as “deathers,” was he killed at all?

Perhaps—and this is putting the kindest spin on it—the information was meant to be confusing and contradictory, even to mislead us. Because how much do we really need to know, and how much is too dangerous for the world to know?

That’s one of the problems with covert operations. In a country that has generally believed in the public’s need to be informed, the secrecy that is necessarily involved in clandestine murders of bad guys goes against that policy.

For example, even divulging that a cell phone call from a courier may have led to the Bin Laden hideout location could be counterproductive. The terrorists will be even more careful next time, and they have already been quite careful. And did the world need to know the exact body of water in which Osama’s body was buried (see this for possible consequences)? And then there are all of these new details that have been leaked (the CIA is officially mum on the subject) about the safe house from which Osama was surveilled.

It was in the neighborhood. It was occupied by “case officers and recruited informants.” This may indicate that—at least for this operation—the CIA used some Abbottabad locals or at least Pakistanis. Could the dissemination of this information compromise their cover? After all, it’s not an especially densely-occupied area. Is it necessary for us—and the rest of the world, including the terrorists—to learn that much, curious though we may be?

And how much do we really know? How much of what we think we know is false?

Holder and terrorism interrogations: a few more details…

The New Neo Posted on by

…you may not have been aware of before. I certainly wasn’t.

Writing in today’s WSJ, former US Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey says:

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say “reopening” advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

It’s one thing to oppose waterboarding as an interrogation technique. It’s another to do this sort of thing.

On Bin Laden’s youngest wife

The New Neo Posted on by

I was wondering where she was and how she’s doing. Here’s a report.

Her name is Amal Ahmed al-Sadah and she is 27. She was shot in the leg during the raid that killed her husband and is recovering in a military hospital in Pakistan, which is refusing to hand her over to the US.

Why did the SEALS not take her with them? The official explanation is that there was no room in the helicopter, which seems a little strange to me for such an important capture.

The following is of special interest:

Ms al-Sadah, who is half the age of 54-year-old bin Laden and younger than some of his at least 20 children, had been gifted to the al-Qaeda leader from a Yemeni family when she was just a teenager

She was just 17 when she and Bin Laden wed in Afghanistan. They later had three children together.

Bin Laden had later reportedly sent her home to Yemen for her own safety but somehow she returned despite being under surveillance.

She has already told Pakistani investigators they had been living in the compound since 2005, according to Time magazine.

Of his other wives, bin Laden had divorced one and three others had moved to Syria.

I wonder what this woman really thinks. Most likely she is just as much a fanatic as her husband, indoctrinated pretty much from birth and groomed to be a consort to the great man. But perhaps not.

And I’m wondering who the divorced wife is. This article purports to shed some light on the matter, but I wonder. It’s got a lot of its other facts wrong, based on erroneous early reports from John Brennan that a wife was used by Osama as a human shield and was killed.

But from the information contained therein about Bin Laden’s marriages, it appears that most of his brides were young teenagers, and that two are divorced from him and another reports herself as having been out of contact with him since 9/11. It appears, therefore, that the guy has been forced to live a fairly monogamous life with al-Sadah in recent years. If we can’t interrogate her, that would be really unfortunate.

As for estranged son Omar, here’s a heartwarming story:

“As time passed, [father Osama] began caning me and my brothers for the slightest infraction,” Omar wrote in an excerpt. He recalled his break with his father, which came when Osama asked him to volunteer to be a suicide bomber and Omar refused. Upon demanding how he could ask such a thing of his sons, bin Laden replied, “’You hold no more a place in my heart than any other man or boy in the entire country’”¦ My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

[ADDENDUM: Unrelated but interesting.]

After Jello hits the floor

The New Neo Posted on by

Many of you may have noticed that I’ve been derelict in posting about jello lately.

What can I say? I’ve been busy. It slipped my mind. There’s nothing new in the jello world.

Flimsy excuses, I know.

But I will now attempt to remedy that failing of mine with the following video of jello’s surprisingly bouncy qualities:

Why am I showing this now? Well, this morning I had a puzzling jello experience, and I thought the video might be able to shed light on the mystery. I was eating some jello—something I rarely do, by the way—and a large clump of it fell off my spoon and onto the floor, only to roll towards the bottom of the stove and under it. But when I looked for it there, it was nowhere to be found.

Disappeared. Not even an oozing purple stain to show where it had once been. I ask the scientists among you to please help explain this perplexing phenomenon, if you can.

Osama, Obama, and Bush: the left’s double standard on terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

Does anyone doubt for a moment how it would have gone down with the left had it been Bush instead of Obama as Commander-in-Chief of the mission to get Osama?

Murderer of an unarmed man. Wimp who hesitated 16 hours to make a decision. Hand forced by others. Braggart afterward. Bungled and contradictory information release. Invading the space of a sovereign nation.

Then there’s the left’s concerted attempt to explain that the enhanced interrogation policy under Bush had nothing to do with getting the information that led to Bin Laden. Or the contradiction in their condemning waterboarding so strongly but praising the Obama administration’s targeted killing of terrorists and (at least in some cases) their family members, whether through drone or firefight.

Case in point: none other than Michael Moore. He declares that Osama Bin Laden was most likely unarmed, and the idea was always to kill him whether he could have been taken alive or not [emphasis mine]:

Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children.

I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, “There was a firefight.” “He used a woman as a shield.” Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed…

[Telling the truth about it wouldn’t] hurt [Obama], because the basic facts will remain the same. Osama is still dead and everybody is happy about it.

Does anyone on earth think that, if it had been Bush rather than Obama, the sentiments would read the same? That Moore would have a lot of faith in Bush despite these circumstances, the lies, the execution-style killing? Or that it wouldn’t hurt Bush if the truth came out?

And in the interests of fairness, let’s ask the same question of the right: that is, if it had been Bush instead of Obama in charge, would their reaction have been different?

We can’t know for sure, but my observation is that most on the right have given Obama some credit for this one. Some have even praised him. Would the left have done the same for Bush? I don’t think so.

As for the right’s criticism of the bungled (or purposely obfuscated) information that’s been disseminated about the raid afterward, that appears to be an equal-opportunity reaction, common on both right and left. So my best guess is that had it been Bush in charge of that the right would have been carping about it as well. It’s not as though Bush was the right’s darling during his presidency; he incurred lots of criticism in his time, especially for his poor communication skills.

Also, if Bush had been in charge of this, the right wouldn’t have one particular handicap the left suffers under: they wouldn’t need to explain away contradictions in the policies they advocate. Most of the right was in favor of enhanced interrogation under certain limited circumstances. Most of the right in in favor of killing terrorists extra-judicially. They wouldn’t need to undergo mental gymnastics to justify their support of the Osama killing.

The mermaid dress returns

The New Neo Posted on by

Mermaid dresses have become au courant. Beyonce sports one here that’s truly hideous:

beyonce.jpg

The dress’s awfulness goes beyond the mere fact that Beyonce can barely walk in it. It’s not just the tight bottom; the top part of the garment is painfully restrictive as well, the decolletage conjuring up the pressed-duck bodices of the Tudor era:

anneboleyn.jpg

And, in another Tudoresque connection, Beyonce’s garb makes me think of these guys, who lack the decolletage but have some of the trimmings:

beefeater.jpg

I well remember the mermaid dresses from 50s. My mother had one that served me as a dress-up costume when it finally got worn and tired. I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that when I grew up I’d have many opportunities to wear beautiful gowns and go to balls, too. But nada.

Here’s an example of the 50s version of the mermaid. It was indeed much lovelier than today’s more crass evocations of the genre, but probably just as much of an impediment to walking:

mermaid50s.jpg

[NOTE: While doing research for this post, I came across something I’d never heard of before called the sumptuary laws. Talk about the nanny state! Maybe progress isn’t illusory after all.]

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and what’s with that lacy stuff on the top of Beyonce’s breasts? Is it fabric, or some sort of tattoo?]